Overview
The artist's technical choices – his frequent use of high saturation, soft focus and overexposure – underline this elegiac, emotive aesthetics.
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has the pleasure to announce an upcoming exhibition of photographs by the American artist, Jack Pierson.
Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. While studying at the Boston College of Arts, he joined artists such as Nan Goldin to create the so-called Boston School.
His artworks have often been described as a road movie's stills, records of an all-American rush towards happiness: his chosen themes – landscape fragments, still lives with ordinary objects, enticing gay nudes - are overtly reminiscent of a contemporary artist's urban lifestyle. The artist, however, is far from wanting to replicate the stale formulas of American dream pop imagery. He is rather looking for their implied emotional content, for what he calls « the tragedy inherent in the pursuit of glamour ».
The artist's technical choices – his frequent use of high saturation, soft focus and overexposure – underline this elegiac, emotive aesthetics. Jack Pierson seeks an almost cinematic idealisation of everyday life. Photography, he says, is « a decoration of life », a moment's vision of another, more beautiful and fictional world. These are images created by an illusive fascination: the artist identifies himself with the picture he is taking, but without forgetting it is nothing more than a projection of his own ideals and desires. Looking at them, one can't help repeating this twofold reaction.
This exhibition presents five large-sized colour photographs (137 x 112 centimetres), chosen by the artist in his Self Portrait series. Five people are shown, none of which is the artist: self-portrait as façade.
Jack Pierson lives both in South California and in New York. His works have been recently exhibited in solo retrospectives at Miami's MoCA and at the University of Philadelphia. The Self Portrait series has been first shown at this year's Whitney Biennial. A large-scale selection of his photographs, Every Single One of Them, was published in 2004 by Twin Palms Publishers and includes several Self Portraits.
In 2000, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has been the first gallery showing Jack Pierson in Paris, and has since hosted three more exhibitions of his work.
